Asia NOW 2024

At Asia Now 2024, NIKA Project Space will present a solo booth by artist Mirna Bamieh, which will serve as a dialogue with her solo project Sour Things that opened on September 8th at NIKA Project Space’s Paris branch. The booth’s exhibition consists of works from the project  “Sour Things. The Pantry”.

In a series of ceramic wall pieces, Grieving in Colours (2024), a batch of gloopy oranges is glazed in a variety of colours. The artist often speaks of how her work addresses collective experiences. In this particular work the singular orange stands for the whole, the whole for a singular orange. The port city of Jaffa, where Bamieh’s paternal family originally hails from, is most commonly associated with the export of citrus. Oranges are highly iconographic in Palestinian visual art and literature, indicating a strong agricultural connection to the land and, following the Nakba, the severance of this bond.

A similar sentiment can be found in Sour Cords (2024), a series of the ceramic objects. Sun-drying is, like fermentation, an age-old practice of food preservation. Here the artist showcases giant ceramic chili peppers, okra, garlic, and cloves. Known for their medicinal and favourable properties—anti-inflammatory for garlic and chili; cloves for good luck and prosperity—there is an aspect of (self-)healing to this work. Some chilis and okras are decorated with childlike drawings of suns, stick men, flowers, and blocky houses, all referring to family and home. Others show huge eyes—eyewitnesses, with multiple fingers protruding from them, rising as towers, as if they were offering some sort of talismanic protection against the ongoing brutality in Palestine, or for that matter, elsewhere.

“Would I be free if I were an object?” runs in different permutations across the drawings, which are also part of the booth, along with a glass neon sign, Sour, a neon sign in Arabic that translates to both sour and lemons in English.